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Friday, September 29, 2017

FINALS UPDATE:Thursday Night Football (4.8), Superstore (1.3), The Good Place (1.4), Will and Grace (3.0) and Gotham (0.9) adjusted up while How to Get Away with Murder (1.0) and Thursday Night Football Pregame (2.0) adjusted down.

WHAT MATTERS:

On Premiere Thursday, NBC popped in a big way with its revival of Must See TV sitcom Will and Grace (2.9). Excluding Olympics and Super Bowl lead-outs, this will be the first NBC sitcom episode to crack a 200 in A18-49+ since... the finale of Will and Grace in 2006.

In terms of W&G's ability to lift all boats around it, the results were mixed but had some clear positives. Superstore (1.2) looks like it will be just a touch below last year's premiere in Plus, but an improvement over some of its ugliness late last season. The Good Place (1.3) basically matched the demo of its post-America's Got Talent preview last week, which seems like a win. And W&G's lead-out Great News (1.3) eked out a new series high, but was still at less than half of its lead-in. The biggest winner of all was the drama Chicago Fire (1.5), which looked great in its move to a new night (topping last year's 1.4 Chicago Med premiere on the night).

Meanwhile, it was TGIT time on ABC, with the two-hour return of Grey's Anatomy (2.3) leading into How to Get Away with Murder (1.1). Grey's Anatomy was amazingly healthy once again vs. last year's 2.5 premiere, but Murder fizzled a bit considering how well it ended last year. The network's nightly average got a lot of help year-to-year since the second hour of Grey's got compared against last year's 1.1 Notorious launch.

Fox's Gotham (0.8) and The Orville (1.1) marched onward after making their timeslot debuts last week. It was a promising showing for Orville, matching last week when it had less competition, and the lineup still looks like an improvement on last year's Rosewood / Pitch duo (they got a 0.7/1.1 for their premieres on this night last year).

And CBS had its first game of Thursday Night Football, after the first two weeks of TNF were cable only (presumably a ploy to get all five CBS games counted in the network's regular season average). As usual, expect these games to adjust way up in finals because the final ratings will include the simulcast rating with NFL Network, though last night's game was mucked up a bit by a weather delay.